


Best Kept Secret

by ProcrastinatingPalindrome



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, SO MUCH FLUFF, a bit chronologically fuzzy but definitely happens before the plot goes to china, a couple of dumb boys who aren't great with complicated feelings, and one very large spider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 16:36:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8631145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProcrastinatingPalindrome/pseuds/ProcrastinatingPalindrome
Summary: Yuuri makes an interesting discovery: perfect and unflappable Victor Nikiforov, star athlete and international darling...was deathly afraid of spiders.





	

Yuuri woke to the sound of a muffled yelp and a thump.

For a moment he lay still, staring at his familiar bedroom ceiling, listening. His brain was still fuzzy with sleep. Had he just dreamed up the sound? He couldn’t hear anything more; maybe it had just been his imagination. But then, what woke him up?

For better or worse, he was awake now, and unlikely to get back to sleep without getting to the bottom of this. A quick look around the house to confirm that everyone was safe and sleeping and the sound had just been in his head would be enough to put his mind as ease. And everything _would_ turn out to be fine, he firmly told his anxious brain, which was already starting to provide images of burglars breaking into the house and medical emergencies and any other number of awful things that could explain the sound. And worse, his brain suggested, didn’t the sound seem to be coming from nearby? Victor’s room was the closest to his. What if something was wrong with Victor? What if Victor was in trouble?

That was the thought that finally dragged him out of bed. Steeling his nerve, Yuuri fumbled for his glasses, tiptoed across the room (everything was going to be fine, no point in waking up the whole house) and gently tugged the door to his room open.

The hallway was not empty. Instead, in the dim light, Yuuri could make out one Victor Nikiforov pacing short laps back and forth in front of his own bedroom door and agitatedly running his hands through his hair. Makkachin sat nearby, panting nervously at her owner’s distress. Maybe there was no burglar breaking into the house, but all was clearly not well.

“Um,” said Yuuri, because how else did one break the awkward silence, “are you okay?”

Realizing he had an audience, Victor froze mid pace, eyes large and anxious as he met Yuuri’s concerned gaze. And then he changed. His posture straightened, his tense expression melting into an easy smile. Yuuri knew that face. It was the one Victor wore for reporters, for his fans, the audience. The charming, unflappable Victor, always perfect, always in control. A few months ago, it might have still fooled Yuuri too.

“What are you doing out of bed, Yuuri? We have practice early tomorrow, you know.” The smile widened a bit, teasing. “Or were you feeling lonely?” 

Yuuri folded his arms, trying to keep the color from rising in his cheeks. “I heard a strange noise.” He wasn’t letting Victor charm his way out of giving a straight answer this time, no he was not.

Something flickered briefly in Victor’s expression, and then it was gone. “Are you sure you didn’t imagine it? Or maybe it was just the house creaking.”

“Sounded like someone screamed to me.”

Now _that_ put the slightest crack in Victor’s calm and carefree mask. “I—you must have been dreaming, Yuuri, I didn’t hear anything at all-”

“Victor.” Yuuri tried to put iron into his voice, but the name still came out sounding more like a plea. “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

The mask wavered and nearly dropped. “Nothing is wrong. Go back to sleep. You need your rest.”

“What about you, then? What are you up at this hour?”

“I-I couldn’t sleep. I was just stretching my legs a bit.”

“So you decided to pace in front of your door?”

The mask finally came down, and Victor’s face folded into a troubled frown as he turned his face away, avoiding Yuuri’s eyes.

“Please,” Yuuri pressed, “I know something’s wrong. Can’t you tell me? I…I want to help you.” His cheeks were beginning to feel a bit warm, and suddenly he was glad Victor wasn’t looking his way.

“It’s fine, Yuuri,” Victor said to the floor. “Really, it’s nothing to worry about.”

“Did you have a nightmare? Are you feeling sick? Was Makkachin hogging the bed?” 

That finally got a short laugh out of Victor. “You won’t leave me alone until I tell you, will you?”

“Nope,” Yuuri agreed, returning the smile as the tension began to lift a bit as last. “I’m as stubborn as you are.”

“Worse, I think. Fine then, stubborn Yuuri. It’s…it was…” Victor trailed off, his expression odd and unfamiliar. He looked almost embarrassed, which wasn’t an emotion Yuuri would have thought his coach capable of.

“You can tell me, Victor. It’s okay.”

Victor chewed at his lip restlessly, his gaze darting back and forth between Yuuri and his closed bedroom door. “Promise you won’t laugh.”

“Of course I won’t.” What in the world could be so embarrassing to rattle Victor this much?

Victor took a short breath and finally let his answer out in a rush. “I…there’s…there’s a very, very large spider on the wall right next to my bed.”

A very pregnant pause followed, as Yuuri tried to wrap his mind around this. “Wh—you mean all this was just about a spider?”

To Yuuri’s secret delight, Victor’s face flushed an adorable deep pink. “A _huge_ spider, Yuuri! As big as my hand, at least!”

“I didn’t know you were scared of spiders.” This really was new information. Yuuri must have browsed through hundreds of fansites and articles dedicated to everything about Victor, from his favorite color to his shoe size, and everything in between. He couldn’t recall anything about arachnophobia.

“ _Scared?_ ” Victor sputtered indignantly, “No no no, that’s not it, I just don’t like their…their legs, and how they move, and all those eyes and especially the big hairy ones…” He trailed off with a shudder.

“That…that sounds like someone who’s scared of spiders.” He shouldn’t tease, he knew, but the thrill of learning something new, something secret, had made him bold.

Victor threw up his hands in frustration, still quite pink. “Fine, then! Fine! I confess! I’m scared of spiders! Are you satisfied?” And with that, he slumped dramatically against the wall, turning his head from Yuuri in a sulk.

“Um. So, that scream…that was you?” 

A sullen nod.

“And that…thump?”

“…my leg was tangled in the blankets, and when I tried to get away, I…fell off the bed.”

Yuuri had to bite his tongue to keep from grinning at the mental image of graceful, confident Victor, tumbling off the bed in a panic over a spider.

The tips of Victor's ears were red, and Yuuri found it difficult to look away from them. It occurred to him that he had never seen Victor flushed like this before. He’d seen him flushed with exertion during practice, of course, and flushed with cold on the rink, with heat from the hot spring, with one too many alcoholic drinks. But Victor, flushed with embarrassment? This was new, and strangely endearing.

“It’s not that a big a deal, is it?” Yuuri said hastily. Endearing or not, he couldn’t leave his coach this upset. “Everyone’s afraid of something!”

“It’s embarrassing,” Victor grumbled against the wall. “And childish. I should have outgrown this years ago. And worse, it doesn’t suit my image at all.”

“Is your image all that important?”

“Of course it is. My career is built upon it.”

“Sure, but…you aren’t performing right now. There’s no audience, no cameras. It’s just me.”

Victor finally turned his face back to Yuuri, his expression unreadable but somehow very tender. “Just you?”

Yuuri’s heart abruptly did a few somersaults in his chest. Suddenly Victor’s soft blue eyes and faint smile were too much. If Victor kept looking at him like that, he…honestly, Yuuri wasn’t sure what he’d do. It was time to backpedal to the original crisis. “O-okay! Let’s go take care of that spider!”

Victor frowned at the abrupt shift in mood. “You—what?”

“You aren’t going to be able to sleep until we get rid of the spider, right?” Yuuri said, with no small amount of forced cheer as he reached for the door. “So, I’ll take care of it for you. I don’t really mind spiders that much.”

Victor’s face melted into the picture of horrified disbelief, as if Yuuri had cheerfully informed him that he enjoyed a little arsenic in his morning coffee.

“I don’t think you understand, Yuuri. This is an _enormous_ spider. The biggest I’ve ever seen. And I’m pretty sure it’s poisonous too. This isn’t something you can just squish in a tissue.”

Yuuri shrugged and pulled the door open. “I’m sure we can figure something out. It can’t be that-” The words died on his lips as he finally got a look at Victor’s tormentor. It was true, spiders didn’t normally bother Yuuri much, but this…this was a lot of spider. A substantial spider. A giant among spider-kind. Its thick brown legs were sprawled out from its spot on the wall, close enough to the bed that Victor could have easily reached out and touched it from there, if doing so wouldn’t have given the poor man a heart attack.

“Oh god, it’s still there,” Victor moaned, poking his head through the door just far enough to see the behemoth. “I was half hoping I was only hallucinating the whole thing.”

Yuuri swallowed drily. “Well. Um. I…don’t think it’s quite as big as your hand, Victor.”

“Thank you, Yuuri. It’s immensely comforting to know the spider is only _slightly_ smaller than my hand.”

“Th-there’s more good news, though! I recognize this one, it’s just a huntsman spider.”

“Are you telling me these things are…common enough around here that you can recognize them on sight?”

“They aren’t all _that_ common but you do see them, um, around. Now and then. But it’s okay, it isn’t a poisonous spider at all! A-at least not to us. They’re good spiders, they eat cockroaches and things!”

“Don’t talk nonsense. There is no such thing as a good spider. Especially not one of that size.”

“It _is_ …pretty big,” Yuuri conceded, backing out of the room carefully. The spider, thankfully, didn’t budge. “I think we, um…need a vacuum cleaner for this. Let me just grab one-”

He had barely turned away, intending to head for the closet, when Victor’s hand clamped down on his arm. “You aren’t leaving me alone with that thing!”

“O-okay! Okay! You can come with me!” 

There was no great distance between Victor’s room and the closet in question, but the going was slow as Victor refused to relinquish his hold on Yuuri’s arm for the short journey.

They shuffled along in silence, until Yuuri cleared his throat. “So. Um. Are you really okay?”

“My pride has been badly bruised,” Victor sighed, “but I think I might survive.”

“Okay. It’s just that you’re…holding my arm pretty tight.”

“Oh.” Victor loosened his grip ever so slightly. “Does it bother you? Do you want me to stop?”

“No, not really.” He said it without thinking, but Yuuri was a bit surprised to realize it was true. He didn’t mind this. A few months ago this kind of physical contact would have been enough to send him into fits, but now…it had become familiar, almost comfortable.

“Do you really not think any less of me for all of this?” Victor asked, after they fell into silence again.

“Of course not. I’m surprised you think I would.”

Victor sighed again. Suddenly he looked tired. “You have to understand, I’m used to keeping close tabs on how I appear to people. The public is very fickle. They expect certain things, and if you can’t deliver or show them something they don’t wish to see, they’ll drop you before you can blink!”

They had arrived at the closet, but Yuuri remained still, watching Victor out of the corner of his eye as he talked. Victor so rarely opened up like this, and Yuuri wasn’t about to stop him now.  

“I can be flawed in certain ways,” Victor continued, “so long as it fits what people want and expect from me. I can be flighty, frivolous. Rude, even, if it’s in the correct way. But losing my temper, or crying, or having childish fears like this? Those things would not be well received. So I have to be careful.”

“You don’t need to be careful right now.” The words came out before Yuuri could think twice about it. “I just want you to be you.”

Victor was silent for a long moment. “I think you’re the only one who’s ever said that to me,” he said softly. There was something almost fragile in his voice.

Yuuri turned away and busied himself with unearthing the vacuum cleaner from the stacks of junk that had been forced into the closet. They kept reaching these points where everything felt too close and terrifyingly real, unknown territory where he simply didn’t know how to proceed.

“I-I mean it,” he said, with more courage than he felt, “You can just be yourself with me. You can get angry and cry if you need to, and if there are any spiders around I...I-I’ll protect you.” What a painfully cheesy thing to say. Yuuri regretted it the moment the words left his mouth, especially when it earned a laugh from Victor.

“You’re very gallant tonight, Yuuri,” he said fondly, a hint of a laugh still in his voice, but at least the sadness had faded away. “Dashing, even. A regular Prince Charming!”

“Then who are you?” Yuuri shot back, hiding his embarrassment behind bluster. “The damsel in distress?” 

Victor tapped a finger against his chin, apparently giving this serious consideration. “No, I think…yes, I would be the fair princess in this story! Tormented by a most foul beast, until the heroic prince arrives!” His expression brightened. “Oh, that’s good. That might be something we could work with. How would you feel about some sort of fairy tale theme for your next season?”

“Shouldn’t we get through this season first?”

“Of course, but it’s good to think of the future too. You’ll want something big and exciting for your second Grand Prix gold medal!”

There is was again, that look, that tenderness, that faith. It was almost painful. 

“We…” Yuuri stopped, lost, and coughed awkwardly, “we can think about the future later. For now, let’s take care of that spider.”

Victor’s bright expression dropped just a bit, just as it always did when Yuuri would change the subject at these times, but he let the subject drop and helped carry the cord as Yuuri dragged the vacuum down the hall. They stopped just before the door.

“You can wait outside, if you want,” Yuuri said, still avoiding Victor’s gaze as he pushed the vacuum’s plug into the wall socket just outside the room. 

“No, I’m coming too.” Yuuri could hear the smile in his voice. “The fair princess has to be there to watch the prince defeat the beast, right?”

Yuuri finally looked back at him and managed a smile of his own. “Right.”

The spider luckily hadn’t moved far from where they had left it, but its legs twitched as Yuuri dragged the vacuum into the room and switched the machine on. Victor followed from behind, close enough that Yuuri could hear the slight nervous tremor on his breath.

Carefully, slowly, Yuuri inched the vacuum nozzle closer to the invader, but not carefully enough. The spider seemed to sense his intentions and quickly scuttled across the wall, prompting Victor to let out a noise that could only be described as a horrified squeak.

“Sorry, sorry! I’ve almost got it!” The spider was backing itself into a corner, and they’d be in trouble if it headed for the ceiling. Or worse, if it ended up on the floor and came crawling towards them. At this point, Yuuri was starting to worry his coach would faint if that happened.

One more try. He switched off the vacuum for just a moment, hoping the lack of noise would keep the spider still. It seemed to be working. Closer, closer, he moved the nozzle as near as he dared to the creature, and flipped the switch back on. The vacuum came back on at full strength, and the spider was sucked down the tube with a soft ‘fwump.’

“Did you get it?” Victor asked, taking a cautious step closer. 

“I-I think so,” Yuuri said, as he pulled open the vacuum lid and carefully lifted the bag out. He held the bag up to the light and gave it a little shake. The shadow of the creature inside wiggled its legs in response.

“I think it’s still alive. Now we need to-” 

“Burn it.”

“I—what?”

“Burn the bag, Yuuri. I’ll get some matches.” 

“No, I’m going to let it go outside! I told you, these are good spiders!”

“Yuuri, as your coach, I’m telling you to kill that damn spider.”

“Just hold on a moment, I’ll take care of it!”

The window, that was the fastest way to resolve this issue. Before Victor could argue the point further, Yuuri had thrown the window open, tugged off the opening of the bag and shook it over the short ledge just past the window. Luckily, it didn’t take long before the spider tumbled out onto the landing. Yuuri didn’t have a chance to close the window himself; Victor had dashed over with a speed Yuuri had never seen from him off the ice and slammed it shut with a loud bang that Yuuri could only hope didn’t wake his entire family.

“Is it gone?” Victor panted, breathless from the suspense.

“Yeah, it just crawled away. It’s gone.”

“Are you sure? It can’t get back in the house?” 

“Unless it learns how to open windows, no.”

“Oh, thank god!” Victor flopped down onto his bed with a happy, relieved sigh. “That’s not something I ever want to experience again. We’re buying bug repellent tomorrow, and lots of it.” Now he fixed Yuuri with that brilliant, heartbreakingly beautiful smile again. “You really were my hero tonight, weren’t you?”

Yuuri’s tongue decided that this was a fine moment to stop cooperating entirely. “Oh, I was just—just trying to—uh, glad I could! Help you!”

Victor chuckled, not unkindly, and pulled himself up off the bed. “Now I must insist that you go get some sleep. We have to be up in four hours to stick to our schedule. Off to bed with you!” And with that he gave Yuuri a little push towards the door.

The crisis was resolved and Victor was happy, but somehow Yuuri felt unsatisfied. It didn’t feel right, just leaving it at that. He got as far as the doorway, Victor playfully nudging him in the back to hurry him along, before he finally turned back, took a breath and looked Victor straight in the eye.

“Next time you’re in trouble, just come get me. No more pacing around by yourself, okay?”

Victor’s smile softened again. Instead of responding to that, he reached out and grabbed Yuuri’s hand.

Before Yuuri could process what was happening, Victor lifted his hand to his lips and pressed a kiss just above Yuuri’s knuckle. “For your valor and kindness, my prince.”

And just as quickly, his door had closed and Victor was gone, leaving Yuuri with a racing heart and a burning face and a hopeless, helpless smile spreading across his face. Silently he swore to never kill another spider again as long as he lived.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was born from the discovery that those awful huge huntsman spiders live in Japan too. Naturally, I had to torment someone with this knowledge.


End file.
